It’s no surprise that YouTube, like every other enterprise, needs to generate revenue to pay the bills. It’s also no surprise that YouTube places ads and other links in its user generated videos to generate that revenue.

What does come as a surprise, at least for me, is the amount of time it took for YouTube to make it impossible to remove ads and other behaviors from YouTube hosted videos embedded on private websites.

Until a few months ago a simple parameter (“rel=0”) added into any YouTube hosted video embedded on your website would prevent YouTube from displaying ads and end of video suggested videos to your video.

With this change, an embedded YouTube video on your site is likely to display a playlist at the end of your video. This drives hard-earned traffic away from your website to YouTube where YouTube has a much better chance of making money.